is, he was perfect in all the relations and duties of life,—a good son, a
good husband, a good father: these were the fruits of his faith. He
believed that the unseen God had given him these ties, had given him his
parents, his children, and that to love them was to love God, to do his
duty to them was to do his duty to God. This was part of his walking
with God, continually under his great Taskmaster’s eye,—walking about his
daily business with the belief that a great loving Father was above him,
whatever he did; ready to strengthen, and guide, and bless him if he did
well, ready to avenge Himself on him if he did ill. These were the
fruits of Noah’s faith.
But you may think this nothing very wonderful. Many a man in England
does this every day, and yet no one ever hears of him; he attends to all
his family ties, doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God,
like one who knows he is redeemed by Christ’s blood; he lives, he dies,
he is buried, and out of his own parish his name is never known; while
Noah has earned for himself a worldwide fame; for four thousand years his
name has been spreading over the whole earth as one of the greatest men
who ever lived. Mighty nations have worshipped Noah as a God; many
heathen nations worship him under strange and confused names and
traditions to this day; and the wisest and holiest men among Christians
now reverence Noah, write of him, preach on him, thank God for him, look
up to him as, next to Abraham, their greatest example in the Old
Testament.
Well, my friends, to understand what made Noah so great, we must
understand in what times Noah lived. “The wickedness of men was great in
the earth in those days, and every imagination of the thoughts of their
heart was only evil continually, and the earth was filled with violence
through them.” And we must remember that the wickedness of men before
the flood was not outwardly like wickedness now; it was not petty, mean,
contemptible wickedness of silly and stupid men, such as could be
despised and laughed down; it was like the wickedness of fallen angels.
Men were then strong and beautiful, cunning and active, to a degree of
which we can form no conception. Their enormous length of life (six,
seven, and eight hundred years commonly) must have given them an
experience and daring far beyond any man in these days. Their bodily
size and strength were in many cases enormous. We read that “there were
giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of
God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them,
the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Their
powers of invention seem to have been proportionably great. We read, in
the fourth chapter of Genesis, how, within a few years after Adam was
driven out of Paradise, they had learned to build cities, to tame the
wild beasts, and live upon their milk and flesh; that they had invented
all sorts of music and musical instruments; that they had discovered the
art of working in metals. We read among them of Tubal-Cain, an
instructor of every workman in brass and iron; and the old traditions in
the East, where these men dwelt, are full of strange and awful tales of
their power.
Again, we must remember that there was no law in Noah’s days before the
flood, no Bible to guide them, no constitutions and acts of parliament to
bind men in the beaten track by the awful majesty of law, whether they
will or no, as we have.
This is the picture which the Bible gives us of the old world before the
flood—a world of men mighty in body and mind, fierce and busy, conquering
the world round them, in continual war and turmoil; with all the wild
passions of youth, and yet all the cunning and experience of enormous old
age; with the strength and the courage of young men to carry out the
iniquity of old ones; every one guided only by self-will, having cast off
God and conscience, and doing every man that which was right in the sight
of his own eyes. And amidst all this, while men, as wise, as old, as
strong, as great as himself, whirled away round him in this raging sea of
sin, Noah was stedfast; he, at least, knew his way,—“he walked with God,
a just man, and perfect in his generations.”
To Noah, living in such a world as this, among temptation, and violence,
and insult, no doubt, there came this command from God: “The end of all
flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through
them, and I will destroy them with the earth. And behold I, even I, do
bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh wherein is
the breath of life; but with thee will I establish my covenant, and thou
shalt make thee an ark of wood after the fashion which I tell thee; and
thou shalt come into the ark, thou and thy family, and of every living
thing, two of every sort, male and female, shalt thou bring into the ark,
and keep them alive with thee; and take thou of all food that is eaten
into the ark, for thee and for them.” What a message, my friends! If we
wish to see a little of the greatness of Noah’s faith, conceive such a
message coming from God to one of us! Should we believe it—much less act
upon it? But _Noah_ believed God, says the Scripture; and “according as
God commanded him, so did he.” Now, in whatever way this command came
from God to Noah, it is equally wonderful. Some of you, perhaps, will
say in your hearts, ‘No! when God spoke to him, how could he help obeying
Him?’ But, my friends, ask yourselves seriously,—for, believe me, it is
a most important question for the soul and inner life of you and me, and
every man—how did Noah know that it was God who spoke to him? It is easy
to say God appeared to him; but no man hath seen God at any time. It is
easy, again, to say that an angel appeared to him, or that God appeared
to him in the form of a man; but still the same question is left to be
answered, how did he know that this appearance came from God, and that
its words were true? Why should not Noah have said, ‘This was an evil
spirit which appeared to me, trying to frighten and ruin me, and stir up
all my neighbours to mock me, perhaps to murder me?’ Or, again; suppose
that you or I saw some glorious apparition this day, which told us on
such and such a day such and such a town will be destroyed, what should
_we_ think of it? Should we not say, I must have been dreaming—I must
have been ill, and so my brain and eyes must have been disordered, and
treat the whole thing as a mere fancy of ill-health; now why did not Noah
do the same?
Why do I say this? To shew you, my friends, that it is not apparitions
and visions which can make a man believe. As it is written, “If they
believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe though one
rose from the dead.” No; a man must have faith in his heart already. A
man must first be accustomed to discern right from wrong—to listen to and
to obey the voice of God within him; _that_ word of God of which it is
said, “the word is nigh thee, in thy heart, and in thy mind,” before he
can hear God’s word from without; else he will only explain away
miracles, and call visions and apparitions sick men’s dreams.
But there was something yet more wonderful and divine in Noah’s faith,—I
mean his patience. He knew that a flood was to come—he set to work in
faith to build his ark—and that ark was in building for one hundred and
twenty years,—one hundred and twenty years! It seems at first past all
belief. For all that time he built; and all the while the world went on
just as usual; and, before he had finished, old men had died, and
children grown into years; and great cities had sprung up perhaps where
there was not a cottage before; and trees which were but a yard high when
that ark was begun had grown into mighty forest-timber; and men had
multiplied and spread, and yet Noah built and built on stedfastly,
believing that what God had said would surely one day or other come to
pass. For one hundred and twenty years he saw the world go on as usual,
and yet he never forgot that it was a doomed world. He endured the
laughter and mockery of all his neighbours, and every fresh child who was
born grew up to laugh at the foolish old man who had been toiling for a
hundred years past on his mad scheme, as they thought it; and yet Noah
never lost faith, and he never lost _love_ either—for all those years, we
read, he preached righteousness to the very men who mocked him, and
preached in vain—one hundred and twenty years he warned those sinners of
God’s wrath, of righteousness and judgment to come, and no man listened
to him! That, I believe, must have been, after all, the hardest of all
his trials.
And, doubtless, Noah had his inward temptation many a time; no doubt he
was ready now and then to believe God’s message all a dream—to laugh at
himself for his fears of a flood which seemed never coming, but in his
heart was “the still small voice” of God, warning him that God was not a
man that he should lie, or repent, or deceive those who walked faithfully
with him; and around him he saw men growing and growing in iniquity,
filling up the cup of their own damnation; and he said to himself,
‘Verily there is a God who judgeth the earth—for all this a reckoning day
will surely come;’ and he worked stedfastly on, and the ark was finished.
And then at last there came a second call from God, “Come thou and all
thy house into the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before me in this
generation. Yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth,
and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the
earth.” And Noah entered into the ark, and seven days he waited; and
louder than ever laughed the scoffers round him, at the old man and his
family shut into his ark safe on dry land, while day and night went on as
quietly as ever, and the world ran its usual round; for seven days more
their mad game lasted—they ate, they drank, they married, they gave in
marriage, they planted, they builded; and on the seventh day it came—the
rain fell day after day, and week after week—and the windows of heaven
were opened, and the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the
flood arose, and swept them all away!
SERMON XI.
THE NOACHIC COVENANT.
GEN. ix. 8, 9.
“And God spake unto Noah, and his sons with him, saying, And I,
behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after
you.”
IN my last sermon on Noah I spoke of the flood and of Noah’s faith before
the flood; I now go on to speak of the covenant which God made with Noah
after the flood. Now, Noah stood on that newly-dried earth as the head
of mankind; he and his family, in all eight souls, saved by God’s mercy
from the general ruin, were the only human beings left alive, and had
laid on them the wonderful and glorious duty of renewing the race of man,
and replenishing the vast world around them. From that little knot of
human beings were to spring all the nations of the earth.
And because this calling and destiny of theirs was a great and
all-important one—because so much of the happiness or misery of the new
race of mankind depended on the teaching which they would get from their
forefathers, the sons of Noah, therefore God thought fit to make with
Noah and his sons a solemn covenant, as soon as they came out of the ark.
Let us solemnly consider this covenant, for it stands good now as much as
ever. God made it “with Noah, and his seed after him,” for perpetual
generations. And _we_ are the seed of Noah; every man, woman, and child
of us here were in the loins of Noah when the great absolute God gave him
that pledge and promise. We must earnestly consider that covenant, for
in it lies the very ground and meaning of man’s life and business on this
earth.
“And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and
multiply, and replenish the earth; and the fear of you and the dread of
you shall be upon every living creature. Into your hand they are
delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, even as
the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life
thereof, which is the blood thereof shall ye not eat. And surely your
blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I
require it, and at the hand of men; at the hand of every man’s brother
will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall
his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.”
Now, to understand this covenant, consider what thoughts would have been
likely to grow up in the mind of Noah’s children after the flood. Would
they not have been something of this kind: ‘God does not love men; He has
drowned all but us, and we are men of like passions with the world who
perished, may we not expect the like ruin at any moment? Then what use
to plough and sow, and build and plant, and work for those who shall come
after us?’ ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’
And again, they would have been ready to say, ‘This God, whom our
forefather Noah said sent floods, we cannot see Him; but the floods
themselves we can see. All these clouds and tempests, lightning, sun,
and stars, are we _stronger_ than them? No! They may crush us, drown
us, strike us dead at any moment. They seem, too, to go by certain
wonderful rules and laws; perhaps they have a will and understanding in
them. Instead of praying to a God whom we never saw, why not pray to the
thunderclouds not to strike us dead, and to the seas and rivers not to
sweep us away? For this great, wonderful, awful world in which we are,
however beautiful may be its flowers, and its fruits, and its sunshine,
there is no trusting it; we are sitting upon a painted sepulchre, a
beautiful monster, a gulf of flood and fire, which may burst up any
moment, and sweep us away, as it did our forefathers.’
Again, Noah’s children would have begun to say, ‘These beasts here round
us, they are so many of them larger than us, stronger than us, able to
tear us to atoms, eat us up as they would eat a lamb. They are
self-sufficient, too; they want no clothes, nor houses, nor fire, like us
poor, weak, naked, soft human creatures. They can run faster than we,
see farther than we; their scent, too, what a wonderful, mysterious power
that is, like a miracle to us! And, besides all their cunning ways of
getting food and building nests, they never do _wrong_; they never do
horrible things contrary to their nature; they all abide as God has made
them, obeying the law of their kind. Are not these beasts, then, much
wiser and better than we? We will honour them, and pray to them not to
devour us—to make us cunning and powerful as they are themselves. And if
they are no better than us, surely they are no worse than us. After all,
what difference is there between a man and a beast? The flood which
drowned the beasts drowned the men too. A beast is flesh and blood, what
more is a man? If you kill him, he dies, just as a beast dies; and why
should not a man’s carcase be just as good to eat as a beast’s, and
better?’ And so there would have been a free opening at once into all
the horrors of cannibalism!
Again, Noah’s descendants would have said, ‘Our forefathers offered
sacrifices to the unseen God, as a sign that all they had belonged to
Him, and that they had forfeited their own souls by sin, and were
therefore ready to give up the most precious things they had—their
cattle, as a sign that they owed all to that very God whom they had
offended. But are not human creatures much more precious than cattle?
Will it not be a much greater sign of repentance and willingness to give
up all to God if we offer Him the best things which we have—human
creatures? If we kill and sacrifice to Him our most beautiful and
innocent things—little children—noble young men—beautiful young girls?’
My friends, these are very strange and shocking thoughts, but they have
been in the hearts and minds of all nations. The heathens do such things
now. Our own forefathers used to do such things once; they were tempted
to worship the sun and the moon, and the rivers, and the thunder, and to
look with superstitious terror at the bears, and the wolves, and the
snakes, round them, and to kill their young children and maidens, and
offer them up as sacrifices to the dark powers of this world, which they
thought were ready to swallow them up. And God is my witness, my
friends, when one goes through some parts of England now, and sees the
mine-children and factory-children, and all the sin and misery, and the
people wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, we seem not to be
so very far from the same dark superstition now, though we may call it by
a different name. England has been sacrificing her sons and her
daughters to the devil of covetousness of late years, just as much as our
forefathers offered theirs to the devil of selfish and cowardly
superstition.
But see, now, how this covenant which God made with Noah was intended
just to remedy every one of those temptations which I just mentioned,
into which Noah’s children’s children would have been certain to fall,
and into which so many of them did fall. They might have become
reckless, I said, from fear of a flood at any moment. God promises
them—and confirms it with the sign of the rainbow—never again to destroy
the earth by water. They would have been likely to take to praying to
the rain and the thunder, the sun and the stars; God declares in this
covenant that it is _He_ alone who sends the rain and thunder, that He
brings the clouds over the earth, that He rules the great, awful world;
that men are to look up and believe in God as a loving and thinking
_person_, who has a will of His own, and that a faithful, and true, and
loving, and merciful will; that their lives and safety depend not on
blind chance, or the stern necessity of certain laws of nature, but on
the covenant of an almighty and all-loving person.
Again, I said, that Noah’s sons would have been ready to fear, and, at
last, to worship the dumb beasts; God’s covenant says, “No; these beasts
are not your equals—they are your slaves—you may freely kill them for
your food; the fear of you shall be upon them. The huge elephant and the
swift horse shall become your obedient servants; the lion and the tiger
shall tremble and flee before you. Only claim your rights as men;
believe that the invisible God who made the earth is your strength and
your protector, and that He to whom the earth belongs has made you lords
of the earth and all that therein is. But,” said God’s covenant to
Noah’s sons, “you did not _make_ these beasts—you did not give them life,
therefore I forbid you to eat their blood wherein their life lies; that
you may never forget that all the power you have over these beasts was
given you by God, who made and preserves that wonderful, mysterious, holy
thing called life, which you can never imitate.” Again, I said, that
Noah’s children, having been accustomed to the violence and bloodshed on
the earth before the flood, might hold man’s life cheap; that, having
seen in the flood men perish just like the beasts around them, they might
have begun to think that man’s life was not more precious than the
beasts’. They might have all gone on at last, as some of them did, to
those horrors of cannibalism and human sacrifice of which I just now
spoke. Now, here, again comes in God’s covenant, “Surely the blood of
your lives will I require. At the hand of every beast will I require it,
and at the hand of every man’s brother will I require it. Whoso sheddeth
man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made
He man.” This, then, is the covenant which God made with Noah for
perpetual generations, and therefore with us, the children of Noah. In
this covenant you see certain truths come out into light; some, of which
you read nothing before in the Bible, and other truths which, though they
were given to Adam, yet had been utterly lost sight of before the flood.
This has been God’s method, we find from the Bible, ever since the
creation,—to lead man step by step up into more and more light, up to
this very day, and to make each sin and each madness of men an occasion
for revealing to Him more and more of truth and of the living God. And
so each and every chapter in the Bible is built upon all that has gone
before it; and he that neglects to understand what has gone before will
never come to the understanding of what follows after. Why do I say
this? Because men are continually picking out those scraps of the Bible
which suit their own fancy, and pinning their whole faith on them, and
trying to make them serve to explain every thing in heaven and earth;
whereas no man can understand the Epistles unless he first understand the
Gospels. No man will understand the New Testament unless he first
understands the pith and marrow of the Old. No man will understand the
Psalms and the Prophets unless he first understands the first ten
chapters of Genesis; and, lastly, no one will ever understand any thing
about the Bible at all, who, instead of taking it simply as it is
written, is always trying to twist it into proofs of his own favourite
doctrines, and make Abraham a high Calvinist, or Noah a member of the
Church of England. Why do I say this? To make you all think seriously
that this covenant on which I have been preaching is your covenant; that
as sure as the rainbow stands in heaven, as sure as you and I are sprung
out of the loins of Noah, so surely this covenant which binds us is part
of our Christian covenant, and woe to us if we break it!
This covenant tells us that we are made in God’s likeness, and,
therefore, that all sin is unworthy of us and unnatural to us. It tells
us that God means us bravely and industriously to subdue the earth and
the living things upon it; that we are to be the masters of the pleasant
things about us, and not their slaves, as sots and idlers are; that we
are stewards and tenants of this world for the great God who made it, to
whom we are to look up in confidence for help and protection. It tells
us that our family relationships, the blessed duties of a husband and a
father, are sacred things; that God has created them, that the great God
of heaven Himself respects them, that the covenant which He makes with
the father He makes with the children; that He commands marriage, and
that He blesses it with fruitfulness; that it is He who has told us “Be
fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth;” that the tie of
brotherhood is His making also; that _He_ will require the blood of the
murdered man _at his brother’s hand_; that a man’s brothers, his nearest
relations, are bound to protect and right him if he is injured; so that
we all are to be, in the deepest sense of the word, what Cain refused to
be, our _brothers’ keepers_, and each member of a family is more or less
answerable for the welfare and safety of all his relations. Herein lies
the ground of all religion and of all society—in the covenant which God
made with Noah; and just as it is in vain for a man to pretend to be a
scholar when he does not even know his letters, so it is mockery for a
man to pretend to be a converted Christian man who knows not even so much
as was commanded to Noah and his sons. He who has not learnt to love,
honour, and succour his own family—he who has not learnt to work in
honest and manful industry—he who has not learnt to look beyond this
earth, and its chance, and its customs, and its glittering outside, and
see and trust in a great, wise, loving God, by whose will every tree
grows and every shower falls, what is Christianity to him? He has to
learn the first principles which were delivered to Noah, and which not
even the heathen and the savage have utterly forgotten.
SERMON XII.
ABRAHAM’S FAITH.
HEBREWS, xi. 9, 10.
“By faith Abraham sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange
country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with
him of the same promise. For he looked for a city, which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”